These good times could blind advisors and investors to coming dangers. The economy and the stock market are often not what they seem to be.

That was the message from a First Eagle Investment Management money manager on Tuesday in Manhattan. Matthew McLennan, portfolio manager and head of the company’s global management team, described an anomaly of investing.

It “is that sometimes when things feel good, it is actually a risky moment,” he said. Looking beyond the latest GDP and jobless numbers, the risks are there, according to McLennan.

The investment fundamentals are now not as good as they were recently because of continuing debt and geopolitical problems, including oil prices recently doubling, McLennan noted. Another warning sign, he added, is that P/E ratios are above historical norms.

After a decade of boom times on Wall Street, it has become a “risky” time for investors because underlying economic problems remain, he noted.

“The record of debt and imbalance in the world economy have not gone away,” he said.

“This is a period replete with confidence despite a lot of questions.” He added that the end of this business cycle could lead to something “very different.”

As the strong market and Lehman Brothers crashed, the nation in 2008 was plunged into a recession, but now it has strong growth rates.

“The economy has recovered. This is not a story of a recovery; the recovery is behind us,” he said. “The stimulus is behind us.”

However, McLennan noted that unemployment rates dropped dramatically over the last decade and the growth rate averaged some 2 percent a year. This year, thanks to tax cuts, it is in the 3 to 4 percent range. This raises the question, he asked, of what the sustainable long-term rate of growth is.

He suggested that the nation could be headed for “a more disappointing rate of growth.” He also warned that passive investors could be vulnerable if the stock market turned down. Owning a stock market that is going through a protracted decline could be very painful, he said.

Yet, as the stock market is marking new highs, it is easy to miss the dangers, he argued, because things have improved so much.

Warning signs of the possible end of the cycle, McLennan said, include record government and corporate debt levels along with continuing geopolitical problems, which have been masked by the last 10 years.

A decade ago, unemployment was over 10 percent and now it is 3.9 percent, the lowest jobless number since 2007 and “pretty consistent with what they were in the 1990s,” he said.

Another danger, McLennan said, is that debt levels usually go down when unemployment declines at the end of the cycle. But that hasn’t been the case this time, he said.

“This [deficit] is very large. And he noted the last time unemployment numbers were so low, the nation had a budget surplus. Still, McLennan said his firm will make no prediction that the economy’s and stock market’s vigorous growth will end. He will only say he sees many signs of overvaluation.

What is an investor to do?

Be careful. That is the way McLennan is running his money.

The First Eagle Investment Management funds, which he said are having problems finding good buys, seem geared for hard times—or at least a slowdown in the booming market. In his Global Fund, for example, McLennan recently had close to 30 percent in cash and gold.

Gold is among his favorites; there is a considerable gold stake in almost all his funds. “The price of gold relative to the S&P 500 is at a very low level.” He says it is at a similarly depressed level to where it was in 2007. What this indicates, he concluded, is that the price of defensive assets is cheap.

The opportunities to obtain great investments, he added, has shrunk. McLennan said “it is a time to think more cautiously.”